Those of you who read The Small Bow newsletter regularly know that poetry has been an important part of my recovery. Every morning, I read a poem as part of my daily journal and reading routine. This began in 2017, when I was working my way through early sobriety. I discovered a poem that I loved — Stephen Dunn’s “The Inheritance.” From there, I began to seek out more contemporary stuff, poems that I read for pure enjoyment. Poems that offered me recognizable worlds and helped me access some of the disorienting feelings I was navigating in early sobriety.

To better promote poetry and the poets who write it on TSB, I’ve started a monthly series called “TSB’s Poet Laureate Club,” where I’ll feature one poet per month whose work I appreciate and have found an excellent complement to my recovery.

This month’s poet laureate is Kyla Jamieson, author of Body Count (Nightwood Editions 2020).

Also! We’re collecting submissions for April Check-Ins. Send the good, the bad, the weird, the sad, the . . . rhyming (?) to [email protected]. Subject: APRIL CHECK-IN. Submissions will be published on TUESDAY, APRIL 7. Anyone who contributes gets a FREE month of TSB’s Sunday edition. If you didn’t get hooked up last month, please email me and I’ll get you situated. Also, if you can’t afford a TSB subscription right now, let me know and I’ll hook you up. But if you can . . . we could use your support. It helps keep us growing and glowing.

Okay, thanks again for your support of TSB. Here’s Kyla Jamieson. —AJD

Can we talk about the moon
tonight? Low & full
in the baby-blue sky. A friend
at my door, the sound
of her laugh & well-loved
heart. I want to be held
up like that. I need a poem
about happiness I haven’t
written yet, an ode
to the ducks in my neighbours’
pool, another for the pink
magnolias of spring—some trees
make it look so easy: Yes,
I can hold all this beauty up.

When I was twenty-six, a brain injury completely dismantled my life and identity. I wrote “I Need a Poem,” the final poem in my book, about a year later. The symptoms that flooded my life after the injury had made my world smaller. I’d lost my peripheral vision, and for eight months — until I regained it, and my reaction time improved — I was unable to drive, but also unable to tolerate the sensory cacophony of public transit. Meanwhile, reading could trigger intense headaches, and the way my brain processed auditory stimuli was also impacted. It was not only my physical world that became smaller, but my intellectual one, too.

One of the most difficult things about learning to live with an invisible disability was compensating for the distance between my experience and the experience others assumed I was having. When I approached a street to cross it, drivers would expect me to see them in my periphery, but I couldn’t. Without driving or the bus, I seldom made it far from home. I developed a walking route around my urban neighborhood that minimized risk, hewing to quieter streets, stoplights, crosswalks, and park benches where I could rest.

During the years defined by my injury and the undiagnosed chronic illness that made it impossible for me to recover for five years, I became a keen observer of whatever beauty I could find in my narrowed life. The bright yellow leaves of the lone ginkgo tree near the end of my walking route, the yucca growing unphased from beneath a bench at the edge of the lawn bowling green, the mallard ducks in the neighboring building’s pool, the magnolia trees lining the street one block from my building — and of course, their brief, beautiful, thick-petalled pink blooms.

The first time I became aware of magnolias, I was struck by their size and the way they seemed to stand on their branches, reaching skywards, defying gravity. They had always been there, in the background of the springs of my life, yet somehow remained invisible to me — until they weren’t. In my mind, these magnolias have become a metaphor for every possibility that exists at the edge of our awareness, fully formed yet imperceptible — until we find ways to attune to more possibility, to welcome more beauty into our lives.

Kyla Jamieson is the author of Body Count (Nightwood Editions 2020). Her poems have been anthologized in Poetry is Not a Luxury: Poems for All Seasons and published widely. Find her online or in the ocean.